Site Search Navigation

Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Baidu Fires Researcher Tied to Contest Disqualification

By John Markoff June 11, 2015 4:17 pmJune 11, 2015 4:17 pm

A week after researchers at Baidu were barred from competing in an international computer vision contest after contest organizers discovered that scientists at the company broke the rules for the competition, the Chinese web service said that it had fired the team leader.

The company did not name the individual in a brief posting Thursday morning on the company’s website, but a spokesman said that Ren Wu, a distinguished scientist at the company’s Institute of Deep Learning, was no longer working for Baidu.

“Any action that runs counter to the highest standards of academic and scientific integrity, no matter how large or small, is unacceptable to us and does not reflect the culture of our company. We have zero tolerance for such behavior and have terminated the team leader’s employment,” the company said in a statement.

Dr. Wu could not be reached for comment. At Baidu, he pioneered the use of specialized graphics processors for machine learning applications such as computer vision and speech.

It requires that computer systems created by the teams classify the objects in a set of digital images into 1,000 different categories. The rules of the contest permit each team to run test versions of their programs twice weekly ahead of a final submission as they train their programs to “learn” what they are seeing.

The researchers had posted a paper titled “Deep Image: Scaling Up Image Recognition,” on the Arxiv.org website ahead of an international computer vision conference, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, which is taking place in Boston this week.

After conference organizers challenged the Baidu researchers for violating the contest rules by submitting hundreds of entries rather than the two per week that were permitted, the researchers appended a note to the paper stating:

“Recently the ILSVRC organizers contacted the Heterogeneous Computing team to inform us that we exceeded the allowable number of weekly submissions to the ImageNet servers (over 200 submissions during the lifespan of our project). We apologize for this mistake, and have put processes into place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“We are working with the ILSVRC organizers to review the results and will continue to provide updates to this paper as our understanding of the results improves. We are staunch supporters of fairness and transparency in the ImageNet Challenge and are committed to the integrity of the scientific process.”

Over the last year, Baidu has aggressively promoted its research in computer vision, highlighting its investment in the design of a custom supercomputer to run new machine learning programs that are intended both to recognize objects in digital images as well as product explanatory phrases explaining what might be visible in a photograph.

Researchers are now using so-called deep learning algorithms, for example, to automatically write sentences like “boy in the picture is hitting a baseball with a bat.” Such advances are made possible by running neural network programs separately over large databases of text and images.

Baidu said in its statement that the research group that had violated the contest rules was not connected “in any way” to research done by other teams at Baidu. The company said it had put in place companywide policies to ensure that its employees meet “the highest standards.” It also said that it planned to establish a scientific advisory panel.

Correction: June 13, 2015An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the website where the paper “Deep Image: Scaling Up Image Recognition” was posted. It is Arxiv.org, not Arvix.org.

Correction: June 13, 2015An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the research team leader who was fired by Baidu after the Chinese web service team was banned from an international computer vision competition. He is Ren Wu, not Wen Ru.

A version of this article appears in print on 06/15/2015, on page B4 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Baidu Scientist Is Fired After Contest Violation.